Home Décor: You may be your home’s je ne sais quoi

Make it your own

by Larissa Lytwyn/Life@Home

Needleman emphasizes the importance of the “need for chatting” through sofas, chairs and other accessories to make a room comfortable.

You might think someone who has made home décor her bread-and-butter grew up in a Martha-perfect home. Think custom-made couches, designer draperies and matchy-matchy furniture. For Deborah Needleman, founding editor of domino, a cult-favorite decorating magazine, and current editor-in-chief of WSJ. Magazine, however, home was not exactly where the heart was.

In her new book, The Perfectly Imperfect Home, Needleman writes, growing up, “Nobody ever tacked up a picture she found amusing. No memento was brought back from a holiday and put on a shelf. No bunch of flowers was ever cut from the yard and stuck in a vase.” While her house was “by no means a sad one,” it was, in its neatness and attractiveness, somehow impersonal.

This childhood spurred Needleman’s passion for houses filled with personality. The more fun, offbeat and asymmetrical, the better. Needleman, then, may be the anti-decorator’s decorator: a decorator for the people.

The Perfectly Imperfect Home is comprised of about 100 essays filled with decorating tips on everything from finding the perfect couch to the arranging that new coffee table. She suggests that the right couch isn’t about buying what Needleman calls “placeholder” couches — sofas you acquire to fill space until you can afford a proper one.

In addition to couches, Needleman emphasizes the importance of settees, smaller chairs, love seats and seating areas ideal to “create places to chat.” Needleman will teach you to position these couches slightly to the side, with space behind them, not up against a wall. This, she writes, will create better flow for you and your family.

Throws look best neatly folded, hanging over the arm of a sofa or the back of an armchair, Needleman suggests.

Decorative mirrors are another favorite Needleman favorite. “If you only have mirrors for checking your face or your outfits, you don’t have enough mirrors in your life,” she writes. “Glamorous” mirrors, as opposed to practical ones, feature lush, gilded frames and funky designs. Think golden starbursts and cool, light reflecting ovals. To lighten a dark room, Needleman suggests, place a mirror on the wall perpendicular to the window, not across from the window, which tends to then absorb the light.

Needleman also offers tips on setting a pretty table, entertaining a small group and other morsels of décor wisdom. “Every room needs a good antique,” Needleman writes, to give that room a “sense of stability.” A good antique is a conversation piece, both decorative and perhaps functional, such as a 1920s vintage French chair, far superior than anything you’ll find in IKEA. Ultimately, “everybody’s threshold for patina is different, but don’t try to clean and buff away a piece’s history,” Needleman writes, or, for that matter, a home’s history. Because, consequently, you may be wiping away your own.